Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill...with Death Star

Scooped from someone out there on the internet, we have a person who used a digital camera and an effects generator to show us the latest round of tourists to hit San Francisco during "Imperial Fleet Week".

Honestly, a lot of the elements of this are quite amateurish and obvious, but at the same time, there are some truly haunting images, like the Death Star "setting" over the hills or glimpsed behind a tree. It's this sort of effective integration of the fantastic with the mundane that can get lost in special effects extravaganzas. So kudos to the maker of this film.

Terry Pratchett speaks on his Alzheimers

By now, most fans of Terry Pratchett's work should know of his battle with an early-onset version of Alzheimer's called Posterior Cortical Atrophy, one that preferentially attacks the rear motor-control and visual portions of the brain.  Here are two articles on Terry Pratchett and the way he is dealing with his situation.

This one from BBC News, talks about how Terry Pratchett is dealing with the disease, and how he is writing in spite of it.  It has quite a few quotes from him.

The article from News of the World WHICH DOES NOT HAVE A PICTURE OF TERRY PRATCHETT AT THE TOP (Seriously, that's a model) is written by Terry Pratchett, is mainly an advocacy piece.  It details the problems he had getting access to a drug that's effective in treating patients of PCA, and goes on to take the National Health Service to task for it's policies, which he argues is going to leave them unprepared for a future influx of patients.

In any case, these are good articles for Terry Pratchett fans who are interested in knowing how, and what he is doing now.  I am personally happy that he's such a fighter.